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I’m mega excited because one of my friends is moving to LA next year so this weekend I booked flights to go and visit her for two whole weeks at the end of Feb!!!

One of the things I love about America is the pancakes, they’re light and fluffy, filling and have so many options for accompaniments! So I decided to make it my mission to make perfect American style pancakes here in the UK before I go to LA so that I can boss it while I’m there.

These are the pancakes I had to live up to:

These are the ones I had at The Tick Tock diner in New York earlier this year and they were absolutely DIVINE.

So I headed off to Pinterest to find myself a recipe. I chose this one from Candace Davenport at Somewhat Simple.

Sift the flour, baking powder and sugar into a large bowl and use a whisk to mix together

In another bowl, crack the eggs and beat together with a fork, add the milk and mix

Around this time, someone set off a firework nearby so Apple came to make sure I was ok:

Add the olive oil to the egg & milk mixture and mix well

Add the wet ingredients to the dry and mix until just combined (don’t overdo it, lumps are ok!)

Get your frying pan on to warm up on a medium heat on the smallest ring of the hob

Add a 1/3 cup of batter to the hot pan

Check your pan position, you want to ensure that wherever you’ve dropped the batter, the heat from the burner is centred directly below the pancake.

Please be SENSIBLE with this! Don’t put your pan in an unbalanced or dangerous position, make sure handles are away from the edge at all times.

Now it’s time to look for BUBBLES

Couldn’t resist!

Serious talk though, bubbles are very important at this stage. You want the whole pancake to have popped bubbles all over before you flip it over. That’s how you’ll know it’s the perfect amount done on the other side.

Check out the picture below, the top one is not quite done, there’s a patch in the bottom left that’s still quite wet with bubbles still below the surface of the batter.

The bottom picture shows the perfect amount of bubbles evenly distributed across the pancake

Once you see perfect bubbles all over, flip it over with your big spatula, it should look like below:

Give it at least thirty seconds on the other side before you check it. Keep checking until it’s lightly done on the other side.

Repeat steps 6-10 until you run out of batter. You should be able to make at least 8 large pancakes

Add your topping of choice, we went for plain ole Maple Syrup but experiment with different kinds of fruit and definitely try bacon and maple syrup if you haven’t had it before!

To go with my Halloween outfit, I decided to crack the glitter out and create glitter tipped nails. To do this, I used Rimmel Metal Rush and Rimmel Precious Stones polishes:

Rimmel Metal Rush – Pearly Queen

Rimmel Precious Stones – Diamond Dust

I started with a clear base coat, then did two coats of the Metal Rush polish. This is a great nail polish in it’s own right, people always comment on it when I wear it as it’s quite unusual. In fact, my boss asked me about it at the end of my job interview!

I then used the Precious Stones polish and started at the tip of my nail, dabbing it along the edge and then gently sweeping it down towards the nail bed. The idea is for the glitter to get lighter towards the bottom of your nail.

Once all of that’s dry, a final clear coat will help it all stay on a bit longer!

I did this for my fairy costume but I think it’ll look great for Christmas parties as well.

Halloween this year was mostly celebrated in the office for me. We had a costume competition and there were trophies at stake!

I went as a fairy since I already had some wings that I bought years ago. What I needed was a fairy tulle skirt so I decided to make my own. There are plenty of tutorials out there on Pinterest for this and I skimmed them to get a basic idea of what I needed to do before I started.

I bought 3 metres of tulle, 1 metre of black, 1 metre of purple and 1 metre of red from Ebay (which cost me less than £5) I already had some elastic but I wish I’d used black elastic rather than white so consider this if you’re using dark coloured tulle.

I was pleased with my final result!

If you’d like to make this skirt you will need:

Needle and thread (or a sewing machine)

Elastic (black would look better)

1 metre of tulle in each colour you want to use (up to 3 metres) – I used Purple, Red and Black

N.b.If you are a size 8-12 you will probably only need 2 metres so divide your colours accordingly), I’m a size 16 and used 3 metres to make the skirt with a couple of inches left over from each colour.

First measure your elastic to your waist size minus a couple of inches. Sew your elastic together using a needle and thread or a sewing machine. A sewing machine it better since you can use a zigzag stitch to avoid it just snapping. If you are using a needle and thread try to imitate a zig zag stitch as shown below:

Fold your tulle in half and cut into 4 inch strips. Repeat for all colours.

Place your elastic on something easy to work from, I used the ironing board:

Attach your tulle to your elastic by using the fold you already created to cut the tulle to create a loop, tuck this loop behind the elastic, bring it over the elastic and pull the remaining tulle through the loop:

Keep doing this until you run out of tulle or the elastic is full. I started with red tulle and then added in purple and black until I had a full skirt:

Continuing my posts on DIY gifts for different people in your life, I’ve compiled my favourite gifts for best friends. Besties can be hard to buy for, especially if you don’t see them as often as you’d like to!

So this tutorial isn’t actually Dr Who themed but it was where my brain went immediately when I saw it. I would theme it with a white checked shirt and add braces to make it even more Dr Who themed. Add a photo of you and your geeky friend for the perfect, personal gift!

It’s October, that means there are only 11 weekends until the big C word… Christmas! If like me, you prefer to make gifts rather than buy them, then that means starting now. Unfortunately, my full time job gets in the way of crafting all day, every day so every weekend between now and then will need to involve some craftiness to get everything ready by Christmas. The last couple of years I have been horribly disorganised so this year will be different!

I’ll be posting DIY gift lists for different people in your life over the next couple of weeks as inspiration!